This article scrutinizes the results of the mission carried out by Edwin Walter Kemmerer in Mexico during 1917. Based on unpublished materials from his private archive, as well as other Mexican archives, this article analyses the process of approval, installation and implementation of the reforms introduced by Kemmerer's mission in Mexico. It is argued that Kemmerer's work as a financial advisor for Venustiano Carranza was not a total failure, as the existing literature on the subject claims. Indeed, on the eve of Great Depression, Mexico exhibited the main institutional features of ‘Kemmererized’ countries: a central bank, the gold standard and a centralized tax system. It is also suggested that the economic knowledge brought into the country by the money doctor moulded the ideological foundation of the new financial and economic elite of revolutionary Mexico.
This article argues that the Mexican exchange rate policy during the interwar years should be characterized as an archetypal case of "fear of floating". Conventional accounts claim that Mexico escaped the Great Depression because its policymakers deliberately repealed the gold standard ideology. Drawing on new archival data, I argue that national policymakers remained conservative with respect to any regime change, and their preference was always for a fix or pegged exchange rate. Overall, this article claims that the monetary regime choice in Mexico was not driven by some new heterodox insights, and once the financial crisis of 1931 had forced a depreciation of the peso, the national monetary authority promptly rushed to join the dollar bloc.
Este artículo analiza los cambios introducidos al sistema bancario por parte dos países latinoamericanos, México y Colombia, durante el periodo entreguerras (1929-1937). Reformas que se cristalizaron en la creación de bancos estatales, fundados con el objetivo de hacer revivir el crédito doméstico después de la penuria crediticia causada por la Gran Depresión. Los casos de México y Colombia permiten apreciar cómo frente a la incapacidad de los bancos comerciales de otorgar crédito el Estado se hizo cargo de la tarea y respondió a las necesidades crediticias de agricultores y otros empresarios domésticos. En este artículo se sustenta que la creación de los bancos estatales permitió a México y Colombia lograr dos objetivos: recuperarse en tiempos relativamente breves de la Gran Depresión y hacerlo sin suspender la institucionalidad política vigente.
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